Such is the story of what we may now remember as one of the signal events in the chequered progress of Christianity. We have to follow its consequences a little further. These were not at first all that its author would have hoped. "Commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is," he said in a private letter, "all that a vain man could wish," but recruits for the Army did not seem to come in faster. In October and November there were elections for Congress, and in a number of States the Democrats gained considerably, though it was noteworthy that the Republicans held their ground not only in New England and in the furthest Western States, but also in the border slave States. The Democrats, who from this time on became very formidable to Lincoln, had other matters of complaint, as will be seen later, but they chiefly denounced the President for trying to turn the war into one against slavery. "The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was" had been their election cry. The good hearing that they got, now as at a later time, was due to the fact that people were depressed about the war; and it is plain enough that Lincoln had been well advised in delaying his action till after a military success. As it was, there was much that seemed to show that public confidence in him was not strong, but public confidence in any man is hard to estimate, and the forces that in the end move opinion most are not quickly apparent. There are little indications that his power and character were slowly establishing their hold; it seems, for instance, to have been about this time that "old Abe" or "Uncle Abe" began to be widely known among common people by the significant name of "Father Abraham," and his secretaries say that he was becoming conscious that his official utterances had a deeper effect on public opinion than any immediate response to them in Congress showed.
In his Annual Message of December, 1862, Lincoln put before Congress, probably with little hope of result, a comprehensive policy for dealing with slavery justly and finally. He proposed that a Constitutional Amendment should be submitted to the people providing: first, that compensation should be given in United States bonds to any State, whether now in rebellion or not, which should abolish slavery before the year 1900; secondly, that the slaves who had once enjoyed actual freedom through the chances of the war should be permanently free and that their owners should be compensated; thirdly, that Congress should have authority to spend money on colonisation for negroes. Even if the greater part of these objects could have been accomplished without a Constitutional Amendment, it is evident that such a procedure would have been more satisfactory in the eventual resettlement of the Union. He urged in his Message how desirable it was, as a part of the effort to restore the Union, that the whole North should be agreed in a concerted policy as to slavery, and that parties should for this purpose reconsider their positions. "The dogmas of the quiet past," he said, "are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed, this could not fail." The last four words expressed too confident a hope as to what Northern policy apart from Northern arms could do towards ending the war, but it was impossible to exaggerate the value which a policy, concerted between parties in a spirit of moderation, would have had in the settlement after victory. Every honest Democrat who then refused any action against slavery must have regretted it before three years were out, and many sensible Republicans who saw no use in such moderation may have lived to regret their part too. Nothing was done. It is thought that Lincoln expected this; but the Proclamation of Emancipation would begin to operate within a month; it would produce by the end of the war a situation in which the country would be compelled to decide on the principle of slavery, and Lincoln had at least done his part in preparing men to face the issue.
Before this, the nervous and irritable feeling of many Northern politicians, who found in emancipation a good subject for quarrel among themselves and in the slow progress of the war a good subject of quarrel with the Administration, led to a crisis in Lincoln's Cabinet. Radicals were inclined to think Seward's influence in the Administration the cause of all public evils; some of them had now got hold of a foolish private letter, which he had written to Adams in England a few months before, denouncing the advocates of emancipation. Desiring his downfall, they induced a small "caucus" of Republican Senators to speak in the name of the party and the nation and send the President a resolution demanding such changes in his Cabinet as would produce better results in the war. Discontented men of opposite opinions could unite in demanding success in the war; and Conservative Senators joined in this resolution hoping that it would get rid not only of Seward, but also of Chase and Stanton, the objects of their particular antipathy. Seward, on hearing of this, gave Lincoln his resignation, which was kept private. Though egotistic, he was a clever man, and evidently a pleasant man to work with; he was a useful Minister under a wise chief, though he later proved a harmful one under a foolish chief. Stanton was most loyal, and invaluable as head of the War Department. Chase, as Lincoln said in private afterwards, was "a pretty good fellow and a very able man"; Lincoln had complete confidence in him as a Finance Minister, and could not easily have replaced him. But this handsome, dignified, and righteous person was unhappily a sneak. Lincoln found as time went on that, if he ever had to do what was disagreeable to some important man, Chase would pay court to that important man and hint how differently he himself would have done as President. On this occasion he was evidently aware that Chase had encouraged the Senators who attacked Seward. Much as he wished to retain each of the two for his own worth, he was above all determined that one should not gain a victory over the other. Accordingly, when a deputation of nine important Senators came to Lincoln to present their grievances against Seward, they found themselves, to their great annoyance, confronted with all the Cabinet except Seward, who had resigned, and they were invited by Lincoln to discuss the matter in his presence with these Ministers. Chase, to his still greater annoyance, found himself, as the principal Minister there, compelled for decency's sake to defend Seward from the very attack which he had helped to instigate. The deputation withdrew, not sure that, after all, it wanted Seward removed. Chase next day tendered, as was natural, his resignation. Lincoln was able, now that he had the resignations of both men, to persuade both of their joint duty to continue in the public service. By this remarkable piece of riding he saved the Union from a great danger. The Democratic opposition, not actually to the prosecution of the war, but to any and every measure essential for it, was now developing, and a serious division, such as at this stage any important resignation would have produced in the ranks of the Republicans, or, as they now called themselves, the "Union men," would have been perilous.
On the first day of January, 1863, the President signed the further Proclamation needed to give effect to emancipation. The small portions of the South which were not in rebellion were duly excepted; the naval and military authorities were ordered to maintain the freedom of the slaves seeking their protection; the slaves were enjoined to abstain from violence and to "labour faithfully for reasonable wages" if opportunity were given them; all suitable slaves were to be taken into armed service, especially for garrison duties. Before the end of 1863, a hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, except for one hideous massacre wrought in the hottest of hot blood, only a few crimes by individuals were committed in execution of these threats. To Lincoln himself it was a stirring thought that when democratic government was finally vindicated and restored by the victory of the Union, "then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue and clenched teeth and steady eye and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consummation." There was, however, prejudice at first among many Northern officers against negro enlistment. The greatest of the few great American artists, St. Gaudens, commemorated in sculpture (as the donor of the new playing fields at Harvard commemorated by his gift) the action of a brilliant and popular Massachusetts officer, Robert Gould Shaw, who set the example of leaving his own beloved regiment to take command of a coloured regiment, at the head of which he died, gallantly leading them and gallantly followed by them in a desperate fight.
It was easier to raise and train these negro soldiers than to arrange for the control, shelter, and employment of the other refugees who crowded especially to the protection of Grant's army in the West. The efforts made for their benefit cannot be related here, but the recollections of Army Chaplain John Eaton, whom Grant selected to take charge of them in the West, throw a little more light on Lincoln and on the spirit of his dealing with "the nigger question." When Eaton after some time had to come to Washington, upon the business of his charge and to visit the President, he received that impression, of versatile power and of easy mastery over many details as well as over broad issues, which many who worked under Lincoln have described, but he was above all struck with the fact that from a very slight experience in early life Lincoln had gained a knowledge of negro character such as very few indeed in the North possessed. He was subjected to many seemingly trivial questions, of which he was quick enough to see the grave purpose, about all sorts of persons and things in the West, but he was also examined closely, in a way which commanded his fullest respect as an expert, about the ideas, understanding, and expectations of the ordinary negroes under his care, and more particularly as to the past history and the attainments of the few negroes who had become prominent men, and who therefore best illustrated the real capacities of their race. Later visits to the capital and to Lincoln deepened this impression, and convinced Eaton, though by trifling signs, of the rare quality of Lincoln's sympathy. Once, after Eaton's difficult business had been disposed of, the President turned to relating his own recent worries about a colony of negroes which he was trying to establish on a small island off Hayti. There flourishes in Southern latitudes a minute creature called Dermatophilus penetrans, or the jigger, which can inflict great pain on barefooted people by housing itself under their toe-nails. This Colony had a plague of jiggers, and every expedient for defeating them had failed. Lincoln was not merely giving the practical attention to this difficulty that might perhaps be expected; the Chaplain was amazed to find that at that moment, at the turning point of the war, a few days only after Vicksburg and Gettysburg, with his enormous pre-occupations, the President's mind had room for real and keen distress about the toes of the blacks in the Cow Island. At the end of yet another interview Eaton was startled by the question, put by the President with an air of shyness, whether Frederick Douglass, a well-known negro preacher, could be induced to visit him. Of course he could. Frederick Douglass was then reputed to be the ablest man ever born as a negro slave; he must have met many of the best and kindest Northern friends of the negro; and he went to Lincoln distressed at some points in his policy, particularly at his failure to make reprisals for murders of negro prisoners by Southern troops. When he came away he was in a state little short of ecstasy. It was not because he now understood, as he did, Lincoln's policy. Lincoln had indeed won his warm approval when he told him "with a quiver in his voice" of his horror of killing men in cold blood for what had been done by others, and his dread of what might follow such a policy; but he had a deeper gratification, the strangeness of which it is sad to realise. "He treated me as a man," exclaimed Douglass. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins."
Perhaps the hardest effort of speech that Lincoln ever essayed was an address to negroes which had to do with this very subject of colour. His audience were men who had been free from birth or for some time and were believed to be leaders among their community. It was Lincoln's object to induce some of them to be pioneers in an attempt at colonisation in some suitable climate, an attempt which he felt must fail if it started with negroes whose "intellects were clouded by slavery." He clung to these projects of colonisation, as probably the best among the various means by which the improvement of the negro must be attempted, because their race, "suffering the greatest wrong ever inflicted on any people," would "yet be far removed from being on an equality with the white race" when they ceased to be slaves; a "physical difference broader than exists between almost any other two races" and constituting "a greater disadvantage to us both," would always set a "ban" upon the negroes even where they were best treated in America. This unpalatable fact he put before them with that total absence of pretence which was probably the only possible form of tact in such a discussion, with no affectation of a hope that progress would remove it or of a desire that the ordinary white man should lose the instinct that kept him apart from the black. But this only makes more apparent his simple recognition of an equality and fellowship which did exist between him and his hearers in a larger matter than that of social intercourse or political combination. His appeal to their capacity for taking large and unselfish views was as direct and as confident as in his addresses to his own people; it was made in the language of a man to whom the public spirit which might exist among black people was of the same quality as that which existed among white, in whose belief he and his hearers could equally find happiness in "being worthy of themselves" and in realising the "claim of kindred to the great God who made them."
It may be well here, without waiting to trace further the course of the war, in which at the point where we left it the slow but irresistible progress of conquest was about to set in, to recount briefly the later stages of the abolition of slavery in America. In 1863 it became apparent that popular feeling in Missouri and in Maryland was getting ripe for abolition. Bills were introduced into Congress to compensate their States if they did away with slavery; the compensation was to be larger if the abolition was immediate and not gradual. There was a majority in each House for these Bills, but the Democratic minority was able to kill them in the House of Representatives by the methods of "filibustering," or, as we call it, obstruction, to which the procedure of that body seems well adapted. The Republican majority had not been very zealous for the Bills; its members asked "why compensate for a wrong" which they had begun to feel would soon be abolished without compensation; but their leaders at least did their best for the Bills. It would have been idle after the failure of these proposals to introduce the Bills that had been contemplated for buying out the loyal slave owners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which was now fast being regained for the Union. Lincoln after his Message of December, 1862, recognised it as useless for him to press again the principles of gradual emancipation or of compensation, as to which it is worth remembrance that the compensation which he proposed was for loyal and disloyal owners alike. His Administration, however, bought every suitable slave in Delaware for service (service as a free man) in the Army. In the course of 1864 a remarkable development of public opinion began to be manifest in the States chiefly concerned. In the autumn of that year Maryland, whose representatives had paid so little attention to Lincoln two years before, passed an Amendment to the State Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation. A movement in the same direction was felt to be making progress in Kentucky and Tennessee; and Missouri followed Maryland's example in January, 1865. Meanwhile, Louisiana had been reconquered, and the Unionists in these States, constantly encouraged and protected by Lincoln when Congress looked upon them somewhat coldly or his generals showed jealousy of their action, had banded themselves together to form State Governments with Constitutions that forbade slavery. Lincoln, it may be noted, had suggested to Louisiana that it would be well to frame some plan by which the best educated of the negroes should be admitted to the franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of all men to the suffrage; but it was adopted as the most effective protection for the negroes against laws, as to vagrancy and the like, by which it was feared they might practically be enslaved again. Whatever the excuse for it, it would seem to have proved in fact a great obstacle to healthy relations between the two races. The true policy in such a matter is doubtless that which Rhodes and other statesmen adopted in the Cape Colony and which Lincoln had advocated in the case of Louisiana. It would be absurd to imagine that the spirit which could champion the rights of the negro and yet face fairly the abiding difficulty of his case died in America with Lincoln, but it lost for many a year to come its only great exponent.
But the question of overwhelming importance, between the principles of slavery and of freedom, was ready for final decision when local opinion in six slave States was already moving as we have seen. The Republican Convention of 1864, which again chose Lincoln as its candidate for the Presidency, declared itself in favour of a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery once for all throughout America. Whether the first suggestion came from him or not, it is known that Lincoln's private influence was energetically used to procure this resolution of the Convention. In his Message to Congress in 1864 he urged the initiation of this Amendment. Observation of elections made it all but certain that the next Congress would be ready to take this action, but Lincoln pleaded with the present doubtful Congress for the advantage which would be gained by ready, and if possible, unanimous concurrence in the North in the course which would soon prevail. The necessary Resolution was passed in the Senate, but in the House of Representatives till within a few hours of the vote it was said to be "the toss of a copper" whether the majority of two-thirds, required for such a purpose, would be obtained. In the efforts made on either side to win over the few doubtful voters Lincoln had taken his part. Right or wrong, he was not the man to see a great and beneficent Act in danger of postponement without being tempted to secure it if he could do so by terrifying some unprincipled and white-livered opponents. With the knowledge that he was always acquiring of the persons in politics, he had been able to pick out two Democratic Congressmen who were fit for his purpose—presumably they lay under suspicion of one of those treasonable practices which martial law under Lincoln treated very unceremoniously. He sent for them. He told them that the gaining of a certain number of doubtful votes would secure the Resolution. He told them that he was President of the United States. He told them that the President of the United States in war time exercised great and dreadful powers. And he told them that he looked to them personally to get him those votes. Whether this wrong manoeuvre affected the result or not, on January 31, 1865, the Resolution was passed in the House by a two-thirds majority with a few votes to spare, and the great crowd in the galleries, defying all precedent, broke out in a demonstration of enthusiasm which some still recall as the most memorable scene in their lives. On December 18 of that year, when Lincoln had been eight months dead, William Seward, as Secretary of State, was able to certify that the requisite majority of States had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the cause of that "irrepressible conflict" which he had foretold, and in which he had played a weak but valuable part, was for ever extinguished.
At the present day, alike in the British Empire and in America, the unending difficulty of wholesome human relations between races of different and unequal development exercises many minds; but this difficulty cannot obscure the great service done by those who, first in England and later and more hardly in America, stamped out that cardinal principle of error that any race is without its human claim. Among these men William Lloyd Garrison lived to see the fruit of his labours, and to know and have friendly intercourse with Lincoln. There have been some comparable instances in which men with such different characters and methods have unconsciously conspired for a common end, as these two did when Garrison was projecting the "Liberator" and Lincoln began shaping himself for honourable public work in the vague. The part that Lincoln played in these events did not seem to him a personal achievement of his own. He appeared to himself rather as an instrument. "I claim not," he once said in this connection, "to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." In 1864, when a petition was sent to him from some children that there should be no more child slaves, he wrote, "Please tell these little people that I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it." Yet, at least, he redeemed the boyish pledge that has been, fancifully perhaps, ascribed to him; each opportunity that to his judgment ever presented itself of striking some blow for human freedom was taken; the blows were timed and directed by the full force of his sagacity, and they were never restrained by private ambition or fear. It is probable that upon that cool review, which in the case of this singular figure is difficult, the sense of his potent accomplishment would not diminish, but increase.